…requires more than just good programming.

There is never a perfect time to start your new software business

So you’ve got an idea for a software product. You think it could be a winner and you don’t want to work for someone else for the rest of your life. When is a good time to start your new venture?

Today.

Yesterday would have been better, but today is the next best thing.

You can always find an excuse to put it off. If you’ve got a well paid job – you don’t want to lose that income. If you’ve got a poorly paid job – you probably don’t have much savings. If you are young you don’t have that much experience. If you are older you probably have a lot more financial commitments.

In truth, there is never a perfect time. If you are waiting for some sort of auspicious planetary alignment before you start your business, you’ll never start it. Life is untidy, unpredictable and complex. I started my company while recovering from emergency eye surgery for a detached retina. That certainly wasn’t how I planned it.

You don’t have to take any big financial risks. It only cost me a couple of thousand pounds (and a lot of hard work) to launch Perfect Table Plan. I plan on launching my new product, Keyword Funnel, early in 2014 for a similar amount of money. There is no need to max out the credit card or risk your house. You just need a computer, some skills, determination and time. If you aren’t prepared to sacrifice a few hours of spare time every week, then you probably haven’t got the drive to succeed at creating a business.

7 thoughts on “There is never a perfect time to start your new software business”

The sentence “You don’t have to take any big financial risks. It only cost me a couple of thousand pounds (and a lot of hard work) to launch…” may lead one to believe that your time is not worth hundreds of thousands of $$$s over the years it takes you to develop a commercially viable piece of software. A software business is much much more than just writing code… without a sale, there is nothing.

There is an opportunity cost. Particularly if you are foregoing payment for other work. But if you have to spend hundreds of thousands of $$$s (in cash or opportunity cost) to find out if your product is commercially viable – I think you are doing something wrong!

I completely agree. With the software business we have the advantage that it is not needed to put a lot of money up front, so let’s say that the barriers are only your knowledge and the time you wish to expend in creating and marketing the product which can be hundreds of hours.

BTW, Andy, thanks a lot for this blog. I read almost any article and found it so useful! I am seriously considering going to one of your two days intensive courses.

Four years ago, me and my wife started talking about having children, and our conclusion was the same in your post: There is never a perfect time to have children. And well, now we have a daughter and a son is coming…

So, a software business is the same as having a child. It’s fun to create it, it’s really hard to raise it, but at the end the result is very enjoyable :)

When my first daughter attended the 5 years of her primary school I coded some scripts to track some school-related events and expenditures. From the first year I saw that this niche was empty, no similar, specific, program was available.
Now she is in the 2nd year of secondary school, and my second daughter is in 3rd primary…. I still have these scripts running….